Even those who haven’t seen Ridley Scott’s 1982 science fiction film Blade Runner (or the 2007 Director’s Cut) will be familiar with the feeling the film evokes—a kind of gritty, brooding melancholy. The film opens with a wide shot of Los Angeles at night, the camera gliding high over the skyscrapers, the city’s twinkling lights, petroleum flares and flickering neon billboards seductively set to Vangelis’ stirring saxophone score.
The question that the film explores—what does it mean to be human?—is wrapped in a muscular plot that pits Deckard (Harrison Ford), an alcohol-dependent retired detective, against escaped replicants seeking to extend their expiry date.
In Scott’s vision, Los Angeles is modelled on an Asian megatropolis: at street level the city is cramped, bustling, anonymous. Filmed entirely at night and in the rain, the city and its figures emerge into frame through plumes of cigarette smoke and steam in a chiaroscuro haze, as though they are phantasms.
The film’s dimly lit interior spaces are crowded with objects and details that richly reference Frank Lloyd Wright’s Art Deco architecture, the fantastic drawings of Italian futurist Antonio Sant Elia, and Edward Hopper’s paintings.
From Deckard’s apartment, with its ancient family photographs propped on a piano, to the maximalist wonderland where J.F Sebastian lives alone with his mechanical toys in an abandoned building, and the Egyptian- and Aztec-inspired headquarters of the Tyrell Corporation, these historically layered environments offer a refuge from the unbearable presence of the outside world.
More than its brutality, the film’s pervasive and claustrophobic nostalgia confirms Blade Runner as a dystopian vision. It signals a retreat from living.
In moments of sudden and fantastic violence in which human and android bodies are blown up, smashed through walls, exploded through panes of glass, and impaled on nails, the buildings come under destruction. Nothing good can come of this place, the film seems to say—so much so that the cautious note of optimism on which the film ends is the possibility of escape, soaring above the city.
This piece originally appeared on the Samstag Museum of Art website as part of the 2020 Adelaide//International FILM PROGRAM.
